I Didn't Get These Scars Falling Over In Church.

[rionaleonhart]

The sixth-season finale of The Mentalist didn't really sit well with me, sadly, for a number of reasons.



The first of these reasons is really just a personal thing: although I do 'ship Jane/Lisbon, I also 'ship Jane with four other people simultaneously. Jeff Winger of Community is another character I 'ship with an entire group of people, but the difference is that I can still enjoy individual pairings involving Jeff. With Jane, it's all or nothing. I was always going to be a bit sad if Jane ended up in a non-polyamorous relationship.

The second: the 'dramatic confession of love at an airport' is far, far too overdone, although there were a couple of aspects I liked about this particular take on it (the first was Jane running and jumping the fence, which felt extremely significant because he hates physical exertion; the second was Jane getting arrested, because of course he got arrested, he just jumped a fence and ran onto a plane without going through security).

The third: the 'I love you' confession felt a bit odd because Jane has always loved Lisbon and Lisbon has always known he loves her. That's never been in question. The revelation that Jane loves Lisbon is no revelation at all; the significant thing for that scene is that Jane romantically loves her. I suppose 'I ROMANTICALLY LOVE YOU' doesn't really sound great in a script, but an 'I'm in love with you' somewhere would have made it feel less 'wait, you just broke onto an aeroplane to tell me something I already knew?'

Well, I suppose you can probably guess that 'I love you' means a particular thing in the context of someone having broken onto an aeroplane to say it, but I'm still a little sad at the conflation of romantic love and other types of love. I can usually accept 'I love you' as a confession of romantic love, but I become uncertain when another love so clearly and so intensely exists already.

The fourth, and really the most significant: apparently, nobody expected The Mentalist to be renewed for a seventh season. When this episode was created, someone involved must have considered it an appropriate final episode for The Mentalist.

This worries me, because there are things that really, really need to be addressed and were not touched on in this episode. In the preceding episode, Jane roped Lisbon into psychologically torturing a confession out of someone. Earlier than that, she shielded him after he murdered Red John. Jane has shot a man to death, strangled a man with his bare hands, buried a man alive, deliberately set a serial killer on someone, carefully arranged things so Rigsby could kill the person who killed his father. Jane is a very dark character, and Lisbon by this point is more his accomplice than his friend. How could the potential final episode just... not acknowledge that? We haven't been watching a romantic comedy; we've been watching a man's gradual descent into becoming a serial killer. It's been unsettling and fascinating, and it's really not the sort of thing you can discard to focus on relationship drama!

Maybe the seventh series will deal with this? I hope so, but the fact that this could have been the final episode has shaken my confidence a little.



For all this, though, there was one scene I absolutely adored: the one where Lisbon storms off and Jane gets miserably drunk and completely forgets that he set up an elaborate trap for a killer and is incredibly confused when people start showing up with guns. PERFECT.

Comments

[ruuger]

What you said, on all your points, but especially this:

someone involved must have considered it an appropriate final episode for The Mentalist.

My theory is that they only did the episode as a gift to the shippers (who are the most vocal faction of fandom, and Robin has said that Simon and Bruno both believe that the show should be about what the fans want rather than what the writers want) since neither the actors nor the writers have seemed particularly passionate about Jane/Lisbon. I'm also guessing they wanted to keep their options open until they were absolutely certain that the show wouldn't be renewed (ha!), and that's why the episode felt so rushed (and resorted to such obvious cliches).

Jane gets miserably drunk and completely forgets that he set up an elaborate trap for a killer and is incredibly confused when people start showing up with guns

I loved that too. He's all WTF THIS WASN'T SUPPOSED TO WORK! FOILED BY MY OWN BRILLIANCE! :D I also loved how he solved the "case of the week" already before the opening credits.

edit: By the way, what have you thought of The Mentalist 2.0 in general? Because when I saw the episode where Jane buys gifts for Cho, Fischer, Abbott, and Wylie, I immediately thought of you and the your Jane-is-in-love-with-everybody theory :D

[rionaleonhart]

The episode really did feel rushed, particularly with regards to Pike, and I'm quite sad that the writers got Jane and Lisbon together when they always seemed reluctant to. I worry they're not really going to know what to do with them now; after all, Rigsby and Van Pelt got married and almost immediately vanished off the face of the Earth.

I feel The Mentalist 2.0 hasn't quite worked for me, alas. I miss Van Pelt and Rigsby, and Jane's scary single-mindedness about pursuing Red John (and all the other ways in which Red John hung over his life; I'm convinced he was afraid to love anyone because Red John might take them away) was a big part of what I loved about his character. He's too well-adjusted now! (Although I'm glad to see, from his willingness to psychologically torture a confession out of the trafficker, that his darkness hasn't entirely flown.)

The episode where he bought gifts for everyone did make me smile, I'll admit - it was a lovely Jane-is-in-love-with-everybody moment - but I didn't quite have the exploding-with-joy reaction I'd have had with the old team.

[wolfy-writing.livejournal.com]

It feels like Red John should have left a void in Jane's head. Red John has been such a major part of Jane's life, giving him goals and directions and a reason to keep going after his family's death left him in a mental institution, and his absence should lead to Jane dealing with all kinds of other stuff he doesn't know how to cope with.

Instead it kind of left a void in the show.

[ruuger]

Agreed about something missing. I've enjoyed 2.0 because I like the new characters (though I also miss the old team terribly), but I really miss dark!Jane as well. I guess the writers felt a pressure to make the show more lighthearted again (I've read a lot of complaints from people who hated the darker, more RJ-focused seasons) and that's why they had Jane deal with his issues off-screen during the 2-year time skip. Which is a shame, because whatever happened during those two years would have been to me the most interesting bit.

Looks like we're in the minority, though, because reportedly "Blue Birds" is already the highest rated episode of the show on IMDb...

[wolfy-writing.livejournal.com]

I think you've summed up my issues. It doesn't feel like a weird and distinctive declaration of romantic love, and the show works best when it's willing to embrace its weird and distinctive aspects. This involved too many cliches that didn't entirely fit. The question with Jane's feelings about Lisbon have never been "Does he love her?" but "Is he in love with her?" and "Is he going to restrain his worst instincts out of concern for her or drag him down with him?" If you're writing two people who love each other as friends developing romantic feelings, it's nice to acknowledge that a form of love existed before things got shippy.

We haven't been watching a romantic comedy; we've been watching a man's gradual descent into becoming a serial killer. It's been unsettling and fascinating, and it's really not the sort of thing you can discard to focus on relationship drama!

This is why the show's been frustrating me since Jane killed Red John. He's deliberately killed multiple people purely because he thinks they deserve to die, and the end point of that vengeance quest should lead to something psychologically significant like him fully realizing what he's become, or developing a whole new "This is why it's okay for me to kill people" fixation, or something big. But instead he takes some time off on a tropical island, rebuilds his team, and the biggest revelation is that he has...romantic feelings for a co-worker! That is not the most interesting or significant thing going on!

Unless I hear something really interesting about Season Seven, I think I may be done with the show.

[rionaleonhart]

Exactly! The entire ending of that episode felt generic, and it really shouldn't have when the characters they were working with were so distinctive.

I'll probably give the seventh season a chance, but, to be honest, I think I consider 'Red John' to be the true ending of the show. In my head, everything since then has been fanfiction with extremely high production values.

[wolfy-writing.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if they really wanted to get me interested in where the relationship was going, they'd throw in something with Jane and/or Lisbon having a realization about their relationship dynamic and the kinds of people they've become. While Jane doesn't have many moral lines left, I think he still has it in him to be genuinely scared if he sees what he's turning Lisbon into, and Lisbon should be disturbed if she honestly confronts both how far she's gotten from doing law enforcement well and how much she's enabling Jane.

If it does get into interesting territory, let me know. If it does anything likely to grab me, I'd be happy to jump back in.